Thursday, October 26th, 2017

When I first moved to the Boston area, there was a local chain of convenience stores known as “Store 24”. As the name implies, most locations were open 24 hours a day. At least one location even featured a fanciful clock to emphasize this:

Despite its name, however, the Store 24 location closest to me in Somerville’s Davis Square was not open 24 hours a day. Instead, it closed at midnight, and only re-opened again at 6 AM. As such, I took to deriding it as the “Store 18”.

Some years later, I was saddened to notice that the store was now called “Tedeschi”. It hurt so bad to lose the dumb little joke I used to ridicule the provincial hours they kept. Unfortunately, after the Tedeschi chain bought Store 24, they decided to eliminate what seemed a far superior (or at least more pronounceable) brand. On the plus side, the store was no longer making a promise it failed to live up to 25% of the time.

Recently, however, I saw that the shop had changed names again. Here is Davis Square’s erstwhile Store 18, as it appears in October of 2017:

Yes, following their purchase of the Tedeschi chain, international convenience store mega-chain/Slurpee retailer 7-11 has decided to put an end to that name. This may be yet another step on the road to a world where every single place we shop is just called “Wal-Mart”, but for now, the result is simply delightful.

You see, the one constant throughout all the name changes has been the location’s hours of 6 AM to midnight. As a result, this store is once again named for hours it does not keep. Perhaps I’ll amend my mockery by calling it the “6-12”.